Let's All Kill Constance (14 page)

"Let me go!"

"If your wife was here, she'd push you in, dummkopf!"

I stared at the open manhole. Far away there was another cry. Fritz cursed.

"You come with me," I said.

"No, no."

"You afraid?"

"Afraid?" Fritz plucked the monocle from his eye. It was like pulling the spigot on his blood. His suntan paled. His eye watered. "Afraid? Of a damn dark stupid underground cave, Fritz Wong?"

"Sorry," I said.

"Don't be sorry for the greatest UFA director in cinema history." He planted his fiery monocle back in its groove.

"Well, what now?" he demanded. "I find a phone and call Crumley to drag you out of this black hole? You goddamn teenage death-wisher!"

"I'm no teenager."

"No? Then why do I see crouched by that damn hole an Olympic chump high-diving into a tide half an inch deep? Go on, break your neck, drown in garbage!"

"Tell Crumley to drive into the storm drain and meet me halfway from the sea. If he sees Constance, grab her. If he finds me, grab even quicker."

Fritz shut one eye to target me with fire from the other, contempt under glass.

"You will take direction from an Academy Award-winning director?"

"What?"

"Drop quick. When you hit, don't stop. Whatever's down there can't grab you if you run! If you see her, tell her to try to catch up. 'Stood?"

" 'Stood!"

"Now die like a dog. Or . . ."he added, scowling, "live like a stoop who got the hell through."

"Meet you at the ocean?"

"I won't be there!"

"Oh yes you will!"

He lurched toward the basement door, and Henry.

"You want to follow that idiot?" he roared.

"No."

"You afraid of the dark?" "I
am
the dark!" said Henry. They were gone.

Cursing Germanic curses, I climbed down into mists, fogs, and rains of night.

QUITE suddenly I was in Mexico, 1945. Rome, 1950.

Catacombs.

The thing about darkness is you can imagine, in one direction, wall-to-wall mummies torn from their graves because they couldn't pay the funeral rent.

Or kindling by the thousand-bone-piles, polo heads of skulls to be hammered downfield.

Darkness.

And me caught between ways that led to eternal twilights in Mexico, eternity beneath the Vatican.

Darkness.

I stared at the ladder leading up to safety—Blind Henry and angry Fritz. But they were long gone toward the light and the crazies out front of Grauman's.

I heard the surf pounding like a great heart, ten miles downstream in Venice. There, hell, was safety. But twenty thousand yards of dim concrete floor stood between me and the salty night wind.

I gasped air because . . .

A pale man shambled out of the dark.

I don't mean he walked crazy-legs, but there was something about his whole frame, his knees and elbows, the way his head toppled or his hands flopped like shot birds. His stare froze me.

"I
know
you," he cried.

I dropped the flashlight.

He grabbed it and exclaimed, "What're
you
doing down here?" His voice knocked off the concrete walls. "Didn't you used to
be
—?" He said my name.
"Sure!
Jesus, you
hiding?
You down here to stay? Welcome, I guess." His pale shadow arm waved my flashlight. "Some place, eh? Been here horses' years. Came down to see. Never went back. Lotsa friends. Want to meet 'em?"

I shook my head.

He snorted. "Hell! Why
would
you want to meet these lost underground jerks?"

"How do you know my name?" I said. "Did we go to school together?"

"You
don't
remember? Hell and damn!"

"Harold?" I said. "Ross?"

There was just the drip of a lone faucet somewhere.

I added more names. Tears leaped to my eyes. Ralph, Sammy, Arnold, school chums. Gary, Philip, off to war, for God's sake.

"Who are you? When did I know you?" "Nobody ever knows anyone," he said, backing off. "Were you my best pal?"

"I always knew you'd get on. Always knew I'd get lost," he said, a mile away.

"The war."

"I died
before
the war. Died
after
it. I was never born, so how come?" Fading.

"Eddie! Ed. Edward. Eduardo, it's
got
to be!" My heart beat swiftly, my voice rose.

"When did you last call? Did you get around to my funeral? Did you even
know?"

"I never knew," I said, inching closer.

"Come again. Don't knock. I'll always be here. Wait! You
searching
for someone?" he cried. "What's she
look
like? You
hear
that? What's
she
look like? Am I right? Yes, no?"

"Yes!" I blurted.

"She went that way." He waved my flash.

"When—?"

"Just now. What's she doing here in Dante's Inferno?"

"What did she look like?" I burst out.

"Chanel No. 5!"

"What?"

"Chanel! That'll bring the rats running. She'll be lucky if she makes it to the surf. 'Stay off Muscle Beach!' I yelled."

"What?"

"'Stay!' I yelled. She's here somewhere. Chanel No. 5!"

I seized my flash from his hands, turned it back on his ghost face.

"Where?"

"Why?" He laughed wildly.

"God, I don't know."

"This way, yeah, this way."

His laugh caromed in all directions.

"Hold on! I can't see!"

"You don't have to. Chanel!"

More laughter.

I swiveled my flash.

Now, as he babbled, I heard something like weather, a seasonal change, a distant rainfall. Dry wash, I thought, but not dry, a flash flood, this damned place ankle-deep, knee-deep, then drowned all the way to the sea!

I whipped my flashlight beam up, around, back. Nothing. The sound grew. More whispers coming, yes, not a change of season, dry weather becoming wet, but whispers of people, not rain on the channel floor but the slap of bare feet on cement, and the shuffled murmur of quiet discovery, arguments, curiosity.

People, I thought, my God, more shadows like this one, more voices, the whole damn clan, shadows and shadows of shadows, like the silent ghosts on Rattigan's ceiling, specters that flowed up, around, and vanished like rainfall.

But what if her film ghosts had blown free of her projector, and the pale screens up above in Grauman's, and the wind blew and the phantoms caught cobwebs and light and found voices, what if, dear God, what if?

Stupid! I cut the light, for the rain-channel-crazed man was still mumbling and yammering close. I felt his hot breath on my cheek and I lurched back, afraid to light his face, afraid to sluice the channel a second time to freeze the floodwater of ghost voices, for they were louder now, closer. The dark flowed, the unseen crowd gathered, as this crazed fool grew taller, nearer, and I felt a plucking at my sleeves to seize, hold, bind, and the rainfall voices far off blew nearer and I knew that I should get, go, run like hell and hope they were all legless wonders!

"I—" I bleated.

"What's wrong?" my friend cried.

"I—"

"Why are you afraid? Look. Look! Look there!"

And I was thrust and bumped through darkness to a greater mass of darkness, which was a cluster of shadows and then flesh. A crowd gathered around a shape that wept and lamented and yearned and it was the sound of a woman drowning in darkness.

As the woman moaned and cried and wept and grew silent to mourn again, I edged near.

And then someone thought to hold out a cigarette lighter, clicking it so that the small blue flame extended toward a shawled and unkempt creature, that fretting soul.

Inspired, another lighter drifted out of the night, hissing, and breathed light to hold steady. And then another and another, small flame after flame, like so many fireflies gathered in a circle until there was illumination circling steadily. And floating within to reveal that misery, that exaltation, that whispering, that sobbing, that voice of sudden pronouncements, were six, twelve, twenty more small blue fires, thrust and held to ignite the voice, to give it a shape, to shine the mystery. The more firefly lights, the higher the voice shrilled, asking for some unseen gift, recognition, asking for attention, demanding to live, asking to solve that form, face, and presence.

"Only from my voices, I would lose all heart!" she lamented.

What? I thought. What's that? Familiar! I almost guessed. Almost knew. What?

"The bells came down from heaven and their echoes linger in the fields. Through the quiet of the countryside, my voices!" she cried.

What? Almost! Familiar, I thought. Oh God, what?

Then a thunderous flood of storm wind flashed from the far sea, drenched with salt odor and a smash of thunder.

"You!" I cried. "You!"

And all the fires blew out to screams in utter darkness.

I called her name, but the only answer was a torrent of shouts in an avalanche of feet in full stampede.

In the roar and rush and ranting, some soft flesh struck my arm, my face, my knee, and then it was gone as I cried, "You!" and "You!" again.

There was an immense roundabout, a thousand millraces of darkness from which a single flame ignited near my mouth and one of the strange beasts cursed, seeing me, and shouted, "You, you scared her away! You!"

And hands were thrust to snatch at me until I fell back.

"No!" I turned and leaped, hoping to hell it was toward the sea and not the ghosts.

I stumbled and fell. My flashlight skittered. Christ, I thought, if I can't get it back—!

I scrambled on hands and knees. "Oh, please,
please!"

And my fingers closed on the flashlight, which resurrected my flesh, got me upright, swaying with the black flood behind, and I broke into a drunken run. Don't fall, I thought, hold" the light like a rope to pull you, don't fall, don't look back! Are they close, are they near, are there others waiting? Great God!

At which moment the most glorious sound cracked the channel. There was an illumination ahead like the sunrise at heaven's door, a loud chant of car horn, an avalanche of thunder! A car.

People like me think in film-bit flashes, over in an instant, dumb in retrospect, but a lightning bolt of exhilaration. John Ford, I thought, Monument Valley! Indians! But now, the damn cavalry!

For ahead, in full plunge from the sea . . . My salvation, an old wreck. And half standing up front. . . Crumley. Yelling the worst curses he had ever yelled, cursing me with the foulest curses ever, but glad he had found me and then cursing this damn fool again. "Don't kill me!" I cried. The car braked near my feet. "Not till we get
outta
here!" Crumley shrieked. The darkness, lit by headlights, reared back. I was frozen with Crumley blaring the horn, waving arms, spitting teeth, going blind.

"You're lucky this damn buggy made it in! What
gives?
"

I stared back into the darkness.

"Nothing."

"Then you won't be needing a lift!" Crumley gunned the gas.

I jumped in and landed so hard the jalopy shook.

Crumley grabbed my chin. "You okay?"

"Now, yes!"

"We gotta back out!"

"Back out!" I cried. The shadows loomed. "At fifty miles an hour?"

"Sixty!"

Crumley glared at the night.

"Satchel Paige said don't look back. Something may be gaining on you."

A dozen figures lurched into the light.

"Now!" I yelled.

We left ...

At seventy miles an hour, backward.

Crumley yelled, "Henry called, said where the damn dumb stupid Martian was!"

"Henry," I gasped.

"Fritz called! Said you were twice as stupid as Henry said!"

"I am! Faster!"

Faster.

I could hear the surf.

WE motored out of the storm drain and I looked south one hundred yards and gasped. "Ohmigod, look!"

Crumley looked.

"There's Rattigan's place, two hundred feet away. How come we never noticed the storm drain came out so close?"

"We never used the storm drain before as Route 66."

"So if we could take it from Grauman's Chinese all the way here, Constance could have gone from here to Grauman's."

"Only if she was nuts. Hell. She was a Brazilian nut factory. Look."

There were a dozen narrow swerving marks in the sand. "Bicycle tracks. Bike it in one hour, tops."